Why do I stay with a cheating wife? It’s not because I’m a simp or because I’m foolish. I will tell you why.
The man who married my mother, I was never his son. When we had people over at our house or we attended an event and he had to introduce his family, he would say, “These are my daughters and that is my wife’s son.” I was never his son.
I was six years old when he met my mother. Unlike other men she’d tried to date who learned about me and went running in the opposite direction, the fact that she already had a child seemed to make him more taken with my mother. Perhaps he saw it as proof that she was fertile and nurturing. I don’t know.
When I tell you our story, you’re going to tell me that I should be grateful. And I am. I am. The man who married my mother wore the man of the house shoes well. He was big on structure and discipline and he paid all of our bills, paid my school fees and put me on his medical cover. But I was only ever his wife’s son, not his.
In my foolish mind, I thought that I could win him over. Make him want to acknowledge me as his. So I stayed on my best behavior and scored all As in school. Of course this didn’t work. I began thinking about looking for my father when I turned eighteen.
My mother didn’t have a lot to say about my father. He was a holiday fling. A Nairobi boy who visited the village with his family on school holidays. They were in love. Or they thought they were until I was conceived. My mother was seventeen and in form three. She saw him maybe once or twice after that.
“Wewe unataka kuzuia kijana wetu asome,” his grandmother told my mother.
And so he vanished from our lives and the village raised me, quite literally. Until the man who married my mother came along.
I finally got the guts to find my father when I turned 28. By this time, I had graduated at the top of my class with an engineering degree and gotten a great job with an airy office and big title. The night before our planned meeting, I couldn’t sleep. I was tossing and turning, thinking about how I could make the best impression. In the morning, I took an hour picking an outfit.
When I finally sat down across from him in a fancy, hideously expensive, outdoor restaurant in Westlands, I was giddy with excitement. I was a little boy all over again. It was as if I was looking at my older self. He had my face. And my body structure. All my excitement was cut short when we began talking. He had only two things to say to me.
First, he wanted to make it clear that he had a wife and children he loved and that he didn’t want ‘this’ to mess it up. Second, he wanted me to quit beating about the bush and be hasty in saying whatever it was I was looking for from him. Was it money? How much? He wasn’t interested in knowing me. I didn’t get to tell him about the many times I’d won. The times I’d fantasized about him standing beside me, readjusting the medal hanging on my neck, beaming with pride.
I left that meeting heartbroken. I was that little boy all over again wishing for a man with a tooth gap like mine, to smile at me with pride in his eyes and call me his. I’m almost forty now. I’ve had a few more wins since. I got married in an exquisite wedding to a beautiful woman. I have a set of twins. A boy and a girl I named after my mother and the man who married her. And I have an even bigger job. And my wife is having an affair with a twenty something year old loctician.
Some things have changed but others remain the same. I still yearn for approval. The empty pit in my heart is still there. Growing.Gnawing at me. Keeping me up at night.
Now you ask me why I stay with my wife. Why do I stay with a woman I know has been shagging another man in a dingy apartment across town? Because I don’t want my children to grow up in a home where they will question their worth. I don’t want my son to ever wonder about where he belongs. To ever be only someone’s wife’s son.
